Wednesday, April 16, 2014

This post
is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources, and
insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally
published at Inc.com.

Want to win
friends and influence people? Here are 10 things that ensure you won’t:

1. You
thoughtlessly waste other peoples’ time. Every time you’re late to an
appointment or meeting says your time is more important. Every time you wait
until the grocery clerk finishes ringing you up to search for your debit card
says you couldn’t care less if others have to wait unnecessarily. Every time
you take three minutes to fill your oversize water bottle while a line stacks
up behind you says you’re in your own little world–and your world is the only
world that matters.

Friday, October 4, 2013

BERTRAND
RUSSELL, the English philosopher, was not a fan of work. In his 1932 essay, “In
Praise of Idleness”, he reckoned that if society were better managed the average
person would only need to work four hours a day. Such a small working day would
“entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life.” The rest of
the day could be devoted to the pursuit of science, painting and writing.

Monday, March 11, 2013

While
income inequality has been falling globally since the 1980s, it has been rising
in most of Europe. The Gini Coefficient, a
widely used measure of income inequality, has risen since that time not only in
Eastern Europe, but among Europe's wealthiest
societies.

Hundreds of
reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome
and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation
and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians
attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and,
apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon,
wealth and leisure -- and who gets the most of both -- more often than poverty
and exhaustion implode civilization.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

PARIS
— For a brief moment before Christmas, self-doubt gripped France. The
beloved French actor Gerard Depardieu — who recently played Obelix, an even
more beloved French comic book character — announced he was moving to Belgium because
President Francois Hollande had threatened to tax millionaires at 75 percent of
their income.